Salient Points Two: Ypres Sector, 1914–18

Cameos of the Western Front

Salient Points Two

Ypres Sector 1914 – 1918

Ypres rises mystic in the sunset glow

The Menin Road winds where the waters flow

And those ever present ghosts that come and go

Speak to me softly

As the Flanders sun sinks low

Tony Spagnoly

Cameos of the Western Front

Salient Points Two

Ypres Sector 1914 – 1918

by

Tony Spagnoly

and

Ted Smith

with an introduction by

Martin Middlebrook

By the same authors:

The Anatomy of a Raid

Australians at Celtic Wood, October 9th, 1917

Cameos of the Western Front

Salient Points

Ypres Sector 1914 – 1918

Cameos of the Western Front

A Walk Round Plugstreet

Ypres Sector 1914 – 1918

First Published in 1998 by

Leo Cooper/an imprint Pen & Sword Books Limited

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Copyright © Tony Spagnoly and Ted Smith 1998

Introduction © Martin Middlebrook

Maps © IMCC Ltd.

Front cover design by Ted Smith

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

ISBN 0 85052 610 8

Typeset by IMCC Ltd. in 11/12 point Garamond Light.

Printed in Great Britain by

Redwood Books Ltd., Trowbridge, Wilts.

CONTENTS

List of Plates

List of Maps

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Author’s Note

Cameos

1. The Black Watch

2. Lord Worsley at Zandvoorde

3. The 1st Royal Welch Fusiliers at Zandvoorde

4. The Worcesters and the Welsh – Gheluvelt 1914

5. The Youngest Soldier

6. Major Lanoe Hawker at Abeele Aerodrome

7. 16th Battalion (The Canadian Scottish) at Kitchener’s Wood

8. Pond Farm

9. Fray Bentos at Hill

10. The Liverpool Irish at Schuler Galleries

11. The O’Donnell twins

12. New Zealand at the village of Messines

13. Reconciliation at Broodseinde

Bibliography

Index

PLATES

German sketch map of Lord Worsley’s grave position

Colonel James’ replacement cross for Lord Worsley’s grave

Household Cavalry Memorial

1st Royal Welch Fusiliers – road at Zandvoorde

The Charge of the Worcesters by Gilbert Holiday

Memorials of the Worcesters and South Wales Borderers

Sunken road at Gheluvelt

Military convoy in Abeele high street

Aerial view of Abeele Aerodrome

Abeele Aerodrome Military Cemetery

Mousetrap Farm

Memorial to the 10th and 16th Battalions, Kitchener’s Wood

Pond Farm bunker

Tank F.47 ditched at Spree Farm

Tank F.45 abandoned near Gallipoli strongpoint

Strongpoint Somme from Gallipoli

Jack and Tom O’Donnell

The upward slope to the village of Messines

Broodseinde crossroads with cemetery

Broodseinde crossroads today

German and British veterans in cemetery, 1931

MAPS

Kortekeer Cabaret

Zandvoorde – Household Cavalry

Zandvoorde – 1st Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers

Gheluvelt

The situation at Gheluvelt, October 31st 1914

Counter-attack by 2nd Battalion Worcesters

St. Julien – Mousetrap Farm

Abeele Aerodrome

St. Julien – Kitchener’s Wood

Counter-attack at Kitchener’s Wood

St. Julien – Pond Farm

St. Julien – Fray Bentos at Hill 35

St. Julien – Schuler Galleries

Zonnebeke – The Old Mill

Messines

Messines trench map

Broodseinde crossroads

DEDICATION

To Mary Ellen Freeman.

Remembrance is the theme of her life.

"To live in the hearts

of those we leave behind

is not to die."

Headstone of Private Louis Rosenberg,

3rd Battalion Worcestershire Regiment,

killed in action 9th December, 1915, aged 27.

Prowse Point Military Cemetery

Warneton, Belgium

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is always the official institutions in these cases that merit a vote of thanks. Without the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Imperial War Museum the Public Record Office, and the Tank Museum at Bovington, modest military projects like this would never see the light of day. We are grateful for the patience and assistance of their respective staffs, for we know time is a valued commodity for them in this day and age when the interest in the years of 1914–1918 has been positively explosive!

Special thanks to Albert Ghekiere for his descriptions of the Institution Royale in the village of Messines as it was in 1914 and also his time spent in showing the crypt in the church as it is today. Again special thanks to Jack Patten for the amount of research he forwarded and the information taken from his private papers regarding the counter-attack of the 16th Battalion (The Canadian Scottish) on Kitchener’s Wood. Jack is a serving officer with today’s Canadian Scottish Regiment. Thanks are due to many other people, especially Mr & Mrs Joseph O’Donnell for permission to include the story of the O’Donnell twins (Joseph being the son of Jack O’Donnell), Mr P. W. Leigh for his permission to feature the exploits of his uncle Second-Lieutenant Hodson at Schuler Galleries, Kathie Willes and James Brazier for their assistance in bringing some professionalism to the proof reading, Calin Kilgour, always available to discuss the formation of the different Cameos, and Katie Nelson (now working in the Gulf) who was kind enough to type some of the early manuscripts.

Last but not least we must show gratitude to Corinne Smith who organised the typing of manuscripts, kept the budget down to reasonable proportions, organised computer supplies, and delivered and collected three children to and from their school while her husband made his frequent day trips to Ypres taking photographs, checking maps and generally enjoying himself.

Tony Spagnoly and Ted Smith, February 1998

PREFACE

A second edition of Salient Points is modestly presented in the hope that it will be enjoyed, if that be a suitable word to describe the reading of some poignant situations and the personalities involved in them.

This is not a guide-book nor an academic study of military actions and deeds which took place in some of the darkest, part-forgotten comers of the hallowed ground we collectively call the Immortal Salient.

What is this unseen emotional pull Ypres has on us, as year after year in increasing numbers, we succumb to this strange force that compels us to return?

Is it because we recognise perhaps that it was here in Flanders almost a century ago that the British professional army, once described as a perfect thing apart, drew that historic line in the sand to defy the mightiest army that the world had seen, keeping faith with her smallest ally and, in so doing, left a generation of her finest in soldiers’ graves around the little Flemish town of Ypres.

No matter how many times we stand at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, winter or summer with attendant crowds or almost alone, the endless names carved upon this imposing edifice seem to send us a clear message not to forget. One of the age old truths of the church comes into its own, In remembrance lies immortality and that surely must be correct.

The unique evening ceremony of Last Post strikes at the hardest heart as those powerful notes sail out on the evening air over the old salient. We cherish the hope that those lying in the multitude of military cemeteries surrounding Ypres hear and acknowledge this nightly mark of the towns people’s respect.

It is difficult for the human mind to encompass all the pain and suffering that went on at Ypres, where every little hamlet entered the English military and domestic language as a byword for sacrifice, with perhaps Passchendaele the worst battlefield of all, way beyond our comprehension.

The poet, John Oxenham, after a visit here in 1917 wrote:

The only way it seems to me to be able to view these fields of war and retain one’s own faith and sanity, and the elemental belief in the sanity of one’s fellows and essential goodness of God, is to regard them each in reverence as mighty altars on which for sake of a great ideal, mankind has proved itself equal to the most supreme of all sacrifices. Greater love hath no man than this.

This profound sentiment would surely have appealed to a widowed mother who, in 1920, travelled alone to Ypres on a cold icy day to stand at Hooge Crater Cemetery before the grave of her only son. She recalls:

I can write no more of your resting place, passionate weeping obliterates my every word. This piteous winter scene for me is Ypres. People coming after me in the endless years to come will see a tidy graveyard with crosses all in a row, and gently green undulating country, hummocky perhaps as uncultivated and uninhabited land often is, but they cannot, will not see what British soldiers fought for, lived in, and died in – tenaciously holding, sublimely, divinely for four long years!

That grieving mother seems to have said it all. She and the great British armies of the time have now marched off the world stage, all we are asked in our turn, is to come and remember. A small price indeed.

Tony Spagnoly, 1998

INTRODUCTION

Why?

Why, more than 80 years after it ended, are more and more people visiting the battlefields of the First World War? Why are more and more books being published about that war? I have retired from my own writing career, but a study of my recent royalty returns shows that sales of my First World War books are actually increasing, despite one of them being nearly 30 years old, while sales on books of later events are diminishing. Why?

I think the answer lies in the fact that we are coasting gently (I hope) towards the end of the century – our century, the century in which we were all born and in which our forebears fought their wars and in which many died. I ask myself, how will history look back on our century and what will it judge the main features of it to have been?

I think that we can already see a sequence of events that will prove to be the century’s landmarks: the First World War, the rise of Communism, a second global conflict, the Holocaust, the atomic age, the Cold War, the fall of Communism, the great leap forward in technology. And it was that first war, with its four-year-long stalemate-carnage on the Western Front that started that sequence and set the scene for what must have been seen as a momentous century. How, people will ask, could supposedly civilised nations send a whole generation of men into a conflict the outcome of which could only be decided when the supply of young men ran out? How could these soldiers endure their conditions so patiently – the survivors to return to a civilian world that barely comprehended what they had suffered, that often could not give them work, and then see their sons and daughters sent into another war because of the results of the shortsighted vindictiveness of some of the victorious politicians of the first war?

Yes, we look back in fascination on that land of trenches and graves. For the British it is an area so accessible that it can be visited on a day trip! Most of us have relatives buried ‘out there’. I am lucky that my uncle, a Territorial platoon sergeant in the Lincolns, has a marked grave. We have a letter from a Belgian priest who buried this Catholic soldier in the little cemetery near the field hospital in October 1915. That was Remi Sidings Cemetery. Now it is Plot I of Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery and 10,000 further ‘died of wounds’ followed Uncle Andrew at that place of suffering.

I have known Tony Spagnoly for many years. Those who become active in battlefield affairs do so for many reasons. For Tony, I know his interest is for the purest of motives. As long as elderly veterans needed help with their visits, Tony was there to help. Now that phase is ending, he and his partner, Ted Smith, are performing the valuable task of setting down on paper for our enjoyment the exploits of some of the soldiers who died on the Ypres Salient. We remember the Somme where the Army of 1916 found its grave one summer and autumn, but the Salient is where the B.E.F. stood so doggedly for the whole four years of war and fought three major battles, where the tenure of the ground by British and Empire troops was so secure that every farm and nearly every lane and corner were given English names, the only sector of the Western Front to be so bestowed.

Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Ted. On behalf of Charles Bowes-Lyon, Lord Worsley, the Welch, the Welsh and the Worcesters, of young Condon and Lanoe Hawker, and all the others in your lovely little book, thank you for helping to keep their memory alive and to lead us to the scenes of their endeavours.

Martin Middlebrook, 1998

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Great War has resulted in the spilling of floods of ink as well as Blood, so said Cyril Falls in his War Books, A Critical Guide – and he wrote that in 1930.

In